Knowtropolis Logo

Client: Knowtropolis

Knowtropolis is one of the most ambitious, and accordingly one of the most exciting projects I’ve taken on recently. The site itself, still in development, is intended to be something of a community-driven YellowPages for the Web 2.0 generation, so it needs both a strong design and more complex backend programming than most small-business sites entail.

Naturally, we started with a logo. The Knowtropolis gang had a lot of very concrete, but also rather vague, ideas about what they wanted: a modern Art Deco look, “like what a booth at the Chicago World’s Fair would look like if it were designed today.” I liked the idea of playing with a city skyline, as I’ve always been rather fond of them, so we developed the logo in that direction.

Black & White Logo

In order to ensure that the skyline was generic enough so as not to isolate any cities, I started by researching Art Deco architecture. Comic books and New York city made excellent muses. I kept a sketchbook of distinctive architectural traits, distilled to simple geometric forms. I then played around with the elements, combining pieces here and there, until it turned into a convincing skyline.

Final Logo(s) Against Background

Since a skyline is much stronger when displayed against a sky, I thought it might add more to the site if the logo came in two flavours: one that would display during daylight hours, and another for nighttime.

It took a good deal of tweaking to get the colours just right, so that both incarnations would use the same pallette and work effectively against the same background, but the final incarnations of the logo work equally well in the same layout, and add a little extra visual punch to the site.